Konya Flashbacks….

“But is it really possible to
find beauty in the most imperfect of things” asked the novice Sufi to his Sufi
Master. 

The Master smiled. In that smile, were
images of years and years of memories, of joyful and sad experiences, of
lost and re-found love, of hopeful desires and fearful reasons. The Master
remembered his own time years back when he was young and asked the grandmaster a similar
question on how to find true happiness when all things are so imperfect. He
remembered his own disillusions and then the moments of epiphany where he
finally realized, it’s not about finding happiness in life but creating it and
often with most imperfect of things around. The Master wondered how long and
far this new student of his, will travel and how easy or difficult his journey
would be to understand and reach this simple conclusion. 

The day was long for me. The long bus ride to Konya from eastern part of turkey was tiring, but the mere
thought of walking on the streets where Rumi once walked and talked and smiled
and dreamed and got awakened by shams, was worth all that visit to this small
city again. There was something thing holy in that city, it always brought an unusual
calm to my heart beats.

Dumping my bags in a small cheap Pansyion (turkish hotel) , and coming back to the
reception I found her, going through the translated poems of Rumi by Coleman
Barks. Japanese, with rough hairs and dirt all over the clothes, but there was
this undeniable shine in her eyes (the ones you find in the main characters of
Murakami books). Usual formalities, introductions, trust building , taking our
guards off, and there we were, sitting like old friends in the Chai Baghche (tea
garden) of Konya discussing Sufism and how it relates to the Japanese concept
of Wabi-Sabi (wikipedia link)
A bit away from us, were a group of people listening to an old man. I
heard the words, beauty, and imperfections and life and was intrigued to hear
more….

The Master, instead of answering,
asked the young boy to do the same, what his grandmaster asked him to do years
ago, asking to find and bring the most beautiful shoe from the shoemaker’s shop. All
these years were passing by the master’s mind in those moments like a silent black and white old movie. He thought  if knowledge and enlightenment is also circular and karmic in nature and
all that stories about evolution and technology and human progress is just an illusion, and if we
humans are just reliving similar lives again and again, just with different
colors. The old man continued with the story (We keep the story of the shoe and
the shoemaker for a later time).

My thoughts were disrupted again… I found myself listening to the Japanese
girl on phone talking to her mother in a strange language. I tried for sometime unsuccessfully, to decipher the emotions beneath these alien words… the stars were all over the sky… the Ramadan moon was about to disappear and  the ghosts of Konya’s past started to appear
slowly to start the ‘Sema’ (sufi whirling ceremony). Ordering another chai for
us both, I, after a very long time, smiled and kept smiling, for no apparent reason…